There’s a lot of panicy headlines going on at the moment about the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) document leaked on Wikileaks, but if you’d like a more measured tone based on the actual content of the document then this Ars Technica article seems to cut through a lot of the random speculation that’s going on at the moment.
Category Archives: Writing
A new version of “Nobody Nowhere”
So we’ve just received the revised edition of Donna’s classic autobiography “Nobody Nowhere” from the publishers with an updated forward, some of the quotes about it on the back and one of Donna’s paintings, “Swing“, on the cover!
Donna originally wrote Nobody Nowhere was in 1990 and as it is considered a classic autobiography of a person with autism a lot of folks don’t realise that Donna never meant it to be published.
Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks. I barely ate, washed or slept. I wrote the book as a goodbye and a last hope. My plan was to let just one person read it, then shred it and burn it then jump in front of a train. But life is rarely as simple as our plans. Instead of the confirmation of hopelessness I expected, I was thrown a challenge; to allow the book to help others. Instead of shredding it, it became copied and read by millions of people around the world. Instead of being burned, it spent 15 weeks on the New York times Bestseller list and shot to number 1 in US, Canada, Japan, and Norway and got translated into over 20 languages worldwide.
The book is still in print and still selling almost two decades later!
Designing and Building Parallel Programs available online
Found via Ian Fosters blog on “Free Books“, his paper book “Designing and Building Parallel Programs: Concepts and Tools for Parallel Software Engineering
This isn’t something new, mind you, it was done 13 years ago in 1995 – quite forward thinking!
VueStar Image Link Patent Info Site
For those who’ve heard about the crazy news about the patent trolls that are invoicing people based on their claims to have invented image linking in 2000 (and patented it in 2002) there is a site that is gathering information about the patent itself (Republic of Singapore Patent No. 95940) and the Australian company behind it.
The site is at http://suevuestar.biz/ and includes the handy information that the Australian patent actually lapsed because they failed to pay the renewal fees!
Bletchley Park in Cash Trouble ?
For the past few weeks I’ve been reading “Codebreakers
But today, via Bruce Scheiers blog, I’ve learnt that the trust that now runs BP has is facing financial problems as they receive no external funding and need cash to help preserve the buildings and the exhibits they restored after taking over the site in the 1990s.
The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation because the Microsoft founder will only fund internet-based technology projects.
For the site that hosted the organisation that arguably saved the day in World War 2, not to mention being the birthplace of the first real computer, Colossus (( yes, I know it wasn’t Turing complete! )), it’s a sad predicament. 🙁
Vacation 1.2.7.0 rc1 released
This is the first release candidate for vacation 1.2.7.0 and fixes a segmentation fault for a broken Reply-To: header where there is no address specified.
I’ve also added a KNOWN_BUGS file which lists the fact that vacation currently doesn’t cope with multi-line (wrapped) headers, this is scheduled to be fixed in 1.3 and work is in progress in the SVN trunk for this.
Please test this and report back – if you find any problems please do report them!
Vacation 1.2.6.4 released
This is a minor bugfix release to the 1.2.6 series of Vacation which purely changes the default location for manual page installation to be /usr/share/man rather than the old /usr/man.
Debian OpenSSL stuffup – SSH keys and SSL certs not random enough (updated)
Update: Debian has a good summary page on their wiki.
This is pretty serious – a packaging stuff-up for OpenSSL by Debian (and hence Ubuntu) has resulted in not-very-random randomness being used in various packages such as OpenSSH for key generation. The Ubuntu report says:
A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system. This particularly affects the use of encryption keys in OpenSSH, OpenVPN and SSL certificates.
This is a Bad Thing(tm), Debian have told their own developers:
Since the nature of the crypto used in ssh cannot ensure confidentiality if either side uses weak random numbers we have also randomized all user passwords in LDAP.
It’s also been around for almost 2 years now according to the Debian security notice:
The first vulnerable version, 0.9.8c-1, was uploaded to the unstable distribution on 2006-09-17, and has since propagated to the testing and current stable (etch) distributions. The old stable distribution (sarge) is not affected.
So now would be a good time to change your passwords, unless you can be certain you’ve never logged into a Debian or Debian derived system..
Quote of the day
By Bruce Schneier:
You know you’ve got a problem when you can’t tell a hostile attack by another nation from bored kids with an axe to grind.
Also, on a crypto related humour note – The Traveling Cryptographer’s Problem, via Bart. 🙂
OED spelling guidance
The OED has a spelling FAQ, so if you’re ever at a loss at whether it’s email, e-mail, Email or E-mail, then worry no more, the OED website says:
We recommend email, as this is now by far the most common form. If in doubt with other words, hyphenate – this is the most comprehensible form of such words.
That same section also has a page on how “ye” came about, and why it doesn’t mean “the”:
The use of ye for the, like the use of f for s, results from a misreading of old letter-forms, in this case the letter ‘thorn’ (for the sound ‘th’), which in its plain version looks like a p with the stem extended above the loop. ‘Thorn’ originated as a runic letter, and is still used in writing the Icelandic language.
Apparently it was mainly used to refer to more than one person as the subject of a sentence.